Dead Man Walking

 

((This came about when, half-asleep, I started to wonder what sort of character Hadeon would be if he were not tied to the WoW universe. Then Captain Deon Smith walked up and slapped a mission report into my hands, metaphorically speaking. I've also echoed a friend's character as a main face here, with her permission. Yes, if Hadeon were human, he'd be played by Idris Elba, black armor from Pacific Rim and all.))


Written while listening to Dead Enough for Life by Icon of Coil.

Chicago, Downtown Elevated; UCAS – November 14^th, 2072

. . . . . Bullets whizzed past and struck the wall three feet above and to the left of his head. Captain Deon “Hades” Smith squinted as the shower of sparks from said bullets striking the smooth metal of the wall momentarily overloaded the night vision on his goggles. What the hell were the bastards using - stick-n-shock rounds? Despite the black gloves on his hands, he had no trouble manipulating the tiny button controls on the side of the goggles and turning on the flare compensation; when the damn eff-comp decided to respond, however, was up to the finicky old piece of junk on his head.
. . . . . “Cap, we've been made!” came a voice in his headset.
. . . . . “No shit,” Deon muttered as another set of sparks set his eyes watering under the goggles. He moved his hand to the sub-vocal mic on his throat and activated transmission. “Copy that. Keep your heads low and fall back to the north stairwell as planned. No heroics.” There would be more cursing, but with the mic hot, he'd keep that to himself. His soldiers had long since learned to stop giving their captain a ribbing about his aversion to public profanity.
. . . . . Flare compensation finally kicked in on the ancient relic he was wearing and he carefully dropped to his belly behind the terminal stand he was using for cover. God bless paranoid corps that chained their worker drones to desks even though interface terminals could be wireless; they were even more of a relic than the decade-old goggles on his face. His team kept the chatter to a minimum while he peeked out at ground level towards the elevators which had seemingly brought half the twenty-two story building's security up at once. Deon hoped it was because they were busy concentrating on getting their asses out of the fire.  
. . . . . When he pulled his head back, the man crouched behind the terminal parallel with him raised one shoulder in something between a shrug and a question. The Cajun had always had a way with body language. “Eleven at the elevators, including a troll with what looks like a shoulder-mounted RPG,” Deon reported over the line. “And they're using electrics, so don't go trusting too heavily on those ballistic vests, aye?”
. . . . . Lieutenant Remy “Shark” LeChay chuckled, “Like we'd be testin' 'em 'gainst grenades otherwise?”
. . . . . Another voice cut in, suddenly loud in his ear through the headset, “North wall breached! We've got-” 
. . . . . A low rumble followed by a deafening bang, then static made Deon's heart stutter in his chest. “Tina? Tee, report! Tee!”
. . . . . “They're swarming, Cap,” came an unusually quiet, sober response from PFC Renner. “We're humped.”

Encouragement

Written while listening to The City Is At War by Cobra Starship.

((In an attempt to ensure I felt properly in-character for my upcoming table-top session with this character, I decided to write a short vignette from her perspective. This is Abigale Two Thunder - a.k.a. "Zata" - from the Shadowrun universe.))


. . . . . Abigale's hands shook as she lit the cigarette clamped between her lips. As she stabbed the match out on the scarred synth-wood of her coffee table and drew a pull of smoke in, images from her medical training flashed in her mind – shriveled, blackened lungs, the A-Z how-to of performing a tracheotomy, yellowed teeth, metastasized lumps of uninhibited cell reproduction. She tried to decide what was worse: knowing what she was doing to herself or knowing why she'd started doing it in the first place. A groan cut through the silence of her tiny flat as she put the just-lit cancer-stick out in a stale cup of soykaf. She couldn't do it. She was still too clean, too responsible, too safe to kill herself – even slowly.
 . . . . . “I have got to find a different outlet,” she muttered, letting herself fall backwards onto the futon which served as both couch and bed. Six-thousand nuyen more in her bank account and she still couldn't shake the nauseating feeling that she was clawing her way out of a million nuyen hole. And that hole was on fire. It had been ten months since bailing on Denver and she still spent every waking moment looking for Red Hands over her shoulder, waiting for the corp to cotton on and send a retrieval team, breaking into cold sweats like she had the DTs every time she heard the metallic click-clicks of an engine turning over.
 . . . . . Taking a deep breath that still tasted faintly of nicotine, Abigale started running through her nightly litany. “This is Seattle. You are not you in Seattle. You are Zata in Seattle. You will survive in Seattle.” Her breath hitched in a snort but she pushed herself onwards. “You make your own fortune here. You have no one to pay for. You know what end of the gun to point. You know how the fire flares.”
 . . . . . The ritual of reassurance was the only sound, if one didn't count the ordinary creak of pipes and thumps of heavy-footed occupants upstairs, in her flat. She didn't even rustle fabric as she pulled a sheet up over her still fully-armored body. In the last ten months, Abigale had gotten comfortable sleeping in her armored jumpsuit, comforted by the stiff prods and unyielding pseudo-ergonomic curves of the plating. A re-breather shared her pillow and a Colt L36 was her teddy bear.
 . . . . . “You know how to ghost,” she told the darkness as she turned off the light. “You know how to deal with Mr. Johnson. The shadows are feared. The shadows are respected.” As an image of the Awakened hobo huddling under the overpass and negotiating with another hobo for entry into the goddamn ACHE, a humorless laugh barked out of her, interrupting her catechisms of courage.
 . . . . . “I am in such deep drek.”